On April 13, 2009, after experiencing a 10% salary reduction department-wide, my CIO friend (serving as the Head of ITS of a large integrated school district) had his position eliminated due to budget reductions and departmental reorganization. His position…and several others…now replaced by a single Executive Director I role. These cuts and realignment project $25M in savings to the company department-wide.

On Dec 01, 2009, a CIO mentor of mine, serving as regional CIO of a large nationally known financial institution, had his position as Regional CIO eliminated due to CEO budget cuts. He described his last week as “hectic” to say the least. He stated in an email,

“My employer eliminated the CIO role (and my job) yesterday. That was a first for me. I thought firms of a certain size always had CIO’s.”

Out…But Not Down

As part of their search for a new opportunity to “take IT to the next level”, these two guys share a similar game plan. They plan to:

Work on their personal brand. (I recommended they become more active in the blogosphere and twitterverse and

Stay focused and actively seek new opportunities. (I recommended they take advantage of social networking sites like LinkedIn. It helped me get my current role.)

Stay in the game and don’t give up.

They are out of work for now…but actively seeking new opportunities. So, please offer any advice you might have for these two leaders. I’ll pass it on to them.

I just finished reading (again) The Power of Ethical Management by Norman Vincent Peale and Kenneth Blanchard (Author of The One Minute Manager.) The book has been in my library for several years where it serves as a reference all year-long.

I recommend this book not only because it is short and concise, but also because it will encourage your company’s leadership to empower all employees to think (and act) ethically by implementing a simple checklist system of “five principles of ethical power.”

According to the authors, there are 5 basic principles to keep in mind when creating your company’s ethics policy:

The 5 P’s of Ethical Power:

Purpose. A purpose combines both your vision as well as the values you would like to see upheld in your business. It comes from the top and outlines specifically what is considered acceptable as well as unacceptable in terms of conduct in your business.

Pride. Pride builds dignity and self-respect. If employees are proud of where they work and what they are doing, they are much more apt to act in an ethical manner.

Patience. Since you must focus on long-term versus short-term results, you must develop a certain degree of patience. Without it, you will become too frustrated and will be more tempted to choose unethical alternatives.

Persistence. Persistence means standing by your word. It means being committed. If you are not committed to the ethics you have outlined, then they become worthless. Stand by your word.

Perspective. In a world where there is never enough time to do everything we need and want to, it is often difficult to maintain perspective. However, stopping and reflecting on where your business is headed, why you are headed that way, and how you are going to get there allows you to make the best decisions both in the short-term as well as the long-term.

During the SP2010 conference in Las Vegas, I had an opportunity to sit in two different sessions on Governance with two different approaches to creating SharePoint Governance:

Governance, Politics, and Diplomacy with SharePoint: Success Factors Beyond Technology by Craig Roth of the Burton Group

SP2010 – Still a need for IT Governance, by Dana Berg and John Roe at SpeakTech.com

The first session (SpeakTech) drilled into more of the technical inclusions needed and gave an example around building a SP2010 Governance plan, albeit from an “IT Governance Plan” perspective.

The second session (Burton Group) focused on Governance from a “website umbrella” or theory point-of-view and then gave a very useful slide listing all the things a good SharePoint Governance plan…or Statement of Governance…should contain.

SharePoint Governance definition one: (SpeakTech)

“The set of people, process, procedures, guidelines, and tools affecting the organization in order to maximize the potential for providing business value, reduce risk during deployment, ensure compliance, eliminate gaps in accountability, set appropriate steering of the service, and ensure the solution can scale with growth and increased usage.”

The speaker went on to describe governance as, “…a balance between users and IT; a balancing of IT systems with the Service, Application, or tools users need; with compliance as a foundation…” He also answered basic questions around:

What is Governance and why do we need it?

How to Conquer Governance

Key Governance Considerations in SP2010

A look at some common business needs

SharePoint Governance definition two: (Roth – the Burton Group)

“Website governance uses people, policy, and process to resolve ambiguity, manage short and long range goals; and mitigate conflict within an organization. Roth went on to explain that, “…ambiguity exists because development teams are often led by unspoken rules…” He mentioned that the inclusion of governance allows you to mitigate conflict – a major value point as it helps to predetermine who wins in an argument before it elevates to a meeting with the business leader. He described the short and long range goals needed as, “…something that optimizes for the organization as a whole…”

While both presentation sessions were very good, I think I took more notes in the Burton Group (Roth) session primarily because I’ve created many detailed IT Governance Plans in my past global SharePoint implementations and I wanted more information from a higher level point-of-view. Roth’s presentation offered that. (I know I’m biased in my note taking, but this was just what I needed. I’ve included more of my notes from that session below:

According to Roth, Governance is not:

A maintenance manual

Standards list

Information architecture

A rule book

Management

IT Governance

A place to put chargeback information (although place it in an appendix if you must include it in your governance plan.)

Anything that doesn’t deal with people, process, or policy. Separate these things into a different, more lover level document.

Governance is:

Governance provides a framework for the above docs and lists and helps ensure their success. Use a federated model to set high level policy but allow for freedom for other groups to make decisions within your framework.

Governance describes the “why” as well as the “how”

The authority of governance derives from executive buy-in which is lost or difficult to obtain for low level details.

A set of issues that HAVE to be addressed.

Main audience is owners of SharePoint sites and portals, both the business owner and his/her IT partner. (although IT audience should be considered as the secondary audience, which is often not the case.)

SharePoint Governance is adopted gradually if the organization has a culture of conforming to website governance.

…and SharePoint has proven vulnerable to chaos when ungoverned due to:

Ease of deployment

Grass roots nature (placing creation in non-IT hands)

Lack of multi-farm management

Frequent overlap with installed capabilities

Creating a Governance plan – a “Statement of Governance”

Roth offered the following points in his session:

Don’t talk Governance without also discussing compliance. (How you will actually check up on it.) Talk with business folks on policies, risk, internal politics, to create a statement of Governance.

Include social enforcement in addition to central control.

Remember a “Statement of Governance” is a living document

Governance Authority:

Executives…Governance Committee… Owner…Resources and stakeholders

An example Statement of Governance (SOG) Document Outline:

Introduction

Includes scope, problem statement, and relationships to other documents

People – a seat at the governance table

Includes the governance team members, rotates members via a fair practice to pick team representatives.

Policy

Anticipates and answers the audience question, “why?”

Is like the constitution in that it lays the intentions and directions that processes will attach to.

Grants authority and justification for governance processes

Process

Includes one level of detail drill down on policy that answers the question, “how?”, for each policy

Ideally, each process is attached to one policy

Measurements

Answers the question, “How will compliance be measured?”

Answers the question, “How will the effects of compliance be measured?”

Step 1 – Benchmark before you deploy SharePoint, so improvements after SharePoint project can be tracked

Step 2 – Use surveys or polling to measure policy

Step 3 – Use iterations over time to measure process.

Timelines – place a rollout schedule in this section

Publish a schedule of when new processes will take effect, and desired metrics over time

Include time for socializing the Statement of Governance

All-in-all the SharePoint Conference 2009 gave plenty of insights into SharePoint Governance. If you are looking for more information on Governance, send me a comment, contact the Burton Group directly, or contact the guys over at SpeakTech.

There are many people talking about Cloud Computing, risk, and SLAs. My CIO friend Arun Manansingh has written a very good blog post to a recent MacWorld article on the subject. I agree with my peers when they say the companies offering cloud computing services aren’t yet able to sign the service level agreements (SLAs) or give the expected level of assurance that our customers need to entrust their core computing tasks to.

But an SLA certainly doesn’t keep outages from happening. (At least not in my experience.) I believe an SLA is no substitute for good old fashioned failover capability.

Infrastructure level SLAs for cloud computing are still emerging as the market and services mature, but the same is not true at the application level. I’m seeing some A-M-A-Z-I-N-G stuff in the works as my customers are architecting applications at design time with the cloud in mind. Folks, this a very big shift from just taking an existing application and trying to retrofit it for the cloud.

Still, we are still a very long way from the reliability expected from my Financial and Oil and Gas customers in order to move core apps to the cloud.

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended today. Please keep in mind this is me paraphrasing what I saw and heard. This is in no way meant to take credit for the below content as many folks smarter then me are the original gurus behind what looks to be a great version of SharePoint.

Business Continuity Management in SP2010

This session focused on the combination of high availability and disaster recovery that can be achieved in SP2010. It focused on Database Mirroring Support, Search Improvements, Backup and Restore, Read Only Databases, and Disaster Recovery Planning.

Database Mirroring Support

Can now have a failover database server for enabling automatic failover.

Support for better database mirroring!

Mirroring benefits – You always have an active copy or replica of your data; increases the avialibility of data.

Search Improvements

Crawl Component is now what used to be the Index Server. It is now a service (instead of an actual server role as in SP2007) and no longer stores a copy of the index on its server.

SP 2010 no longer has dedicated roles tied to the server anymore. You can place service applications on any servers. (This seems to be a recurring theme in the new version.)

Search is now a high availability solution with mirror database right out of the box. (This had to be configured complex in SP2007.)

With larger scale comes greater responsibility

Query servers now process queries in parallel.

Asynchronous database mirroring still NOT SUPPORTED for SP2010 Search. Synchronous mirroring is supported. Failover clustering is still supported, but Microsoft pushing synchronous mirroring as the average DR config.

Back Up and Restore

Based on SQL Server backup and restore

Ranges from backing up entire farms to just individual databases.

What’s New?

Support for backup and restore of farm config settings

Can back up your customizations if packaged and deployed as a solution package…aka “.WSP” (This is cool and eliminates risk!)

SQL Server backups do not back up full farm configurations because some files are still stored on the file server.

Site collection now backs up as a .BAK file and is stored on the file server.

SQL backup only deals with backing up SQL databases. This means Service Applications running on the servers or things on the server are not backed up using SQL backup. Need 3rd party tool.

Granular backup is finally here! You can now browse an offline database and browse its content. From there you can export a site collection, site, lists, etc.

Unattached restore can take snapshots of your database in order to restore without attaching the database to SharePoint. This improvement allows you to take content out for examination or restore.

Read Only Database Support

Support for marking a database as read only database. This locks the content in the site collection from writes and edits. Think of the uses for this!

The only issue is that when you mark a database as read only, that DB is no longer participating in mirroring.

Best Practice – Stated in many presentations…Configure more than one machine for each of the service applications.

Best Practice – Custom code or changes should be implemented as a packed solutions file (.WSP) in order to be backed up.

Best Practice – Use unattached databases to restore Site Collections, Sites, Lists, and Docs (OM)

Advanced PowerPivot…aka “Gemini”

This session focused on the PivotPoint client and numerous excel formulas that can be used to filter and report on data, basically taking EXCEL to the next level.

The presenter retrieved over 3 million rows of data in a spreadsheet.

I found out that PowerPivot uses a compression algorithm that is column based and not row based like traditional result sets. This is how Microsoft can speed up the query and results. The client composes data into highly compressed columns to find patterns…not the same as data mining – works along side data mining solutions.

Only limited by the amount of memory on your machine

Accessing and importing data from Reporting is a great way to get data into PowerPivot.

The PowerPivot client and PowerPivot datasets is a read only environment. If you want to change the data, you have to export the data as an excel services workbook.

Like most BI, PowerPivot is good for aggregation

Results and calculations – PowerPivot sums on the entire table object and keeps it in memory.

Planning, Deploying, and Administering Excel Services and PowerPivot in SP2010

This session picked up on the PowerPivot conversation but focused on the relationship between Excel Services and PowerPivot from the server side…as well as the integration points and pains.

The product is so new that the best practices are still being developed by Microsoft from lessons learned in their implementations.

Deploying PowerPivot server applications and related pieces into an existing SP2010 farms is a complex server side installation and configuration. This is all hidden from the user and makes the “magic” on the PowerPivot client and from within Excel Services workbooks look easy.

If you choose to deploy PowerPivot on its own server in a “new farm”, then most of the configuration seems to be scripted for you. Else, you have to choose which PowerShell scripts to run.

The server side of PowerPivot requires two service applications:

SQL Analysis Services Mid-Tier Service

SQL Analysis Services Engine Service

SP2010 Central Admin has a PowerPivot Management dashboard that is basically just a webpart page with web parts linked to excel workbooks. The dashboard is for Gemini settings for server/service health monitoring and quality of service from ECS (Excel Calculation Services) web parts.

Part of the same presentation above took a look at the Excel Services changes for SP2010.

Excel Services is a real server. Many customers thought it was just a published excel workbook.

Excel Services fro SP2010 is now coded as an SOA model service application in WCF for scalability.

It has a high integration and fidelity with the Excel Client.

Keeps user sessions in memory on the server – this is controlled by the SP central admin config for Excel service application.

Excel Services is built ON TOP OF SharePoint 2010. It is now a service application and works OOTB with default settings with little to no config setup required.

While users requests hit the web front end and a proxy service, the real action of Excel Services happens on the service application called ECS (Excel Calculation Services)

When planning for Excel Services, the number of ECS servers you deploy depends on the number of users and the workbook mix…plus the delay time the client is willing to accept for results and refreshes…J So, like the other new service applications in SP2010, you can now run multiple service applications per SP farm. (In SP2007 you could only have one per farm.)

In SP2007, Excel Services is load balanced based on the URL of the workbook. SP2010 uses a round robin model for “Health based load balancing” requests and sessions for excel services

There are two types of major settings for Excel Service:

Global Settings

Trusted Location Settings

Excel Services will only load files from trusted locations. This location can be anywhere in the farm, site, doc library, UNC path, or HTTP location.

Claims based Authentication – Kerberos is used between SP2010 and the data source if delegating identities. No more need for Kerberos between SP2010 components. Uses an unattended account credentials which are stored in the new SP2010 Secure Store Service (SSS) which encrypts ID.

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended today. Please keep in mind this is me paraphrasing what I saw and heard. This is in no way meant to take credit for the below content as many folks smarter then me are the original gurus behind what looks to be a great version of SharePoint.

SP2010 Search Deep Dive

Microsoft’s new search statement: Search is Social

Social networking drives search quality

Search click through behavior drives relevance ranking

Social tagging influences item’s ranking

SP Search End User Enhancements:

Easier to extend

Improved “Did you mean” suggestions

New “View in browser” link (opens item in office web app) for office documents…No more need to download or save as and open the rich office client…although this is still an option.

Metadata refinement

Better hit highlighting

Recently authored content

New feature – top searches and top searched documents

Pre-Query suggestions based on what you are searching for…as you type!

Multiple Indexers – You can now have index partitions! (Partitioning the Index can allow for mirroring partitions.)

Crawl Distribution – Componentize the system – You can now have more than one indexer per farm! Indexer is no longer the single point of failure. Can have multiple property databases now.

Indexer server role is now just a true crawler…it doesn’t actually store a copy of the index anymore. Crawlers partition indexed data and then propagate it to the query servers…no more storing the copy of the index on the index server.

Search Admin component added

Search Admin database added

Enhanced multi-lingual support & synonyms

Integrated Language auto-detect now a feature with SP Search and FAST

Improved language dictionary support

Support for Boolean operators for free text queries and property queries

Improved operator search

Crawl time significantly reduced (Microsoft beta case study – from 2weeks to crawl reduced down to 4 days…175 items per second crawled at Microsoft)

Content Distribution – Built in load balancer distributes the hosts over to crawl databases.

Site Admins can tell crawler what content to search and ignore; admins can set up crawl rules so crawler only crawls content covered by that content database.

Query Distribution – Distribution by a hash of the Document ID

Industrial Strength Resiliency – a search machine down doesn’t result in crawl downtime…now have the ability to add multiple crawlers each targeting different partitions across the enterprise

Search security – Item security is grabbed at the crawl time for SharePoint content. Security trimmed.

Still need to write a custom security trimmer for non SharePoint content

Additional Search Enhancements Based on Microsoft Responding to Customer Feedback:

Support for full regular expressions in crawl rules

Native support for case sensitive repositories

Ability to prioritize the content sources so as to distribute the crawler’s resources

New configurable “Crawl Policy” to define how crawler treats error conditions it encounters.

Low indexing downtime as it runs during search backups

SP2010 Search Extensibility Enhancements:

All out-of-the-box search web parts are public and not hidden and easily extended (you weren’t allowed to mess with these in sp2007 as they were hidden)

Query Federation! – can now bring in external search results into SP2010 Search

Sp 2007 was about the content type…but SP 2010 is about Content Type Syndication…where content types can be utilized via hubs to share and manage content across farms (finally, in sp2007 the content type was limited to the site collection and it took lots of custom code to synch / copy them across the farms.)

Many site collection Content Types can be grouped into ‘HUBS” which allow them to act as one logical site collection.

NEW – OPENXML

NEW – RBS…Remote BLOB storage…Sp 2010 and SQL 2008 R2 will support external storage of blobs (binary large objects) configured per content database.

Benefit is better CAPEX for large scale deployments greater then 5TB storage.

NEW – CMIS Support (Content Mgmt Interop Servics) is an Emerging Interop Standards by Microsoft and 17 vendors

Enables apps to target one or more ECM repositories uniformly across the enterprise

Rationalize the interoperability story between repositories across the enterprise

Support for REST and SOAP

NEW – Document ID – Documents stored in SP 2010 now have document Ids that move with the document across the enterprise. (finally)

Can now move, copy, or move and leave a link in document libraries and fileshares.

Office web app -à so you do not have to download and open in rich office client. Can preview office documents without needing to download. (this can be turned off per document item if security warrants.)

NEW – “Content Organizer” moves documents around the environment based on metadata, can now move between different sites.